David Irwin

David Irwin is a managing partner at Education Elements. His mission is to help expand Education Elements' current capabilities beyond personalized learning and become the nation’s premier K-12 education consultancy. Prior to joining Education Elements, David spent 14 years at Gartner Inc., the world's leading IT research and advisory firm and for the past 8 years led Gartner’s K-12 education, partnering with school boards, superintendents, chief academic officers and chief information officers, and supporting mission critical transformational initiatives. David's past and recent clients include: NYC Department of Education, Houston Independent School District, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Broward County Schools (FL), Louisiana Department of Education, Arlington Public Schools, Dallas Independent School District, Fulton County Schools and Buffalo Public Schools. David has expertise helping K-12 districts with strategy and assessments, quality assurance and monitoring, project management, business and technical requirement development, budgeting and forecasting, operations management and K-12 district wide IT system implementation.

The Trump Administration’s 2017 and 2018 education budget proposes some drastic cuts, most notably, the elimination of the $2.3 billion Title II-A (ESEA) funding and $1.2 billion 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. According to the administration, ESEA funding and 21st Century Community Learning Centers programs are ineffective and duplicative. But the budget documents (which consist of more than 27 volumes of artifacts) did not explain why they are ineffective (or with what they are duplicative), though there is no shortage of opinions on both sides of the debate. This is our current reality. Outrage isn’t going to help, so I’m focusing on the actions we can take, given the reality we face.

Radically changing the core of what a school does is hard work. It requires vision and commitment from district leadership, incredibly strong leadership from principals and dedicated teachers that truly believe the educational options they have provided their students can be better. Since 2010, my organization has been incredibly lucky to have worked with more than 500 schools across more than 100 school districts that have done just that (with impressive results). We read the recently released RAND report “Insights on Personalized Learning Implementation and Effects (July 2017)” with optimism, but also a little bit of concern about over-generalizations from their findings and conclusions. First, it’s important to note that 40 schools included in the RAND report received funding from the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) with the intention of creating one innovative school model. In the case of the schools and districts we support, they are teeing up the funding (as well as models, infrastructure and support) for many more schools from the beginning. Why is this important?...

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